Chapter Text
He heard her footsteps before the basement door opened, listened as she descended the stairs, but he didn’t look up from his work. “Are you coming to bed tonight?” Laura asked, same as she had the night before, and the night before that. For three weeks he had been holed up in the basement and his answer remained the same.
“I’m gonna stay down here. I’ve got work to finish,” Clint replied, blowing a puff of air at the trick arrow head in his hand to remove the fine metal filings and inspecting it closely.
Every night she accepted this answer and left him to his vices, but apparently she’d had enough. “The world isn’t going to end if you wait until tomorrow to finish that… is that a boomerang arrow?” She laughed at the ridiculousness of the idea, but when he looked up at her sharply the mirth faded.
“The world can end in a snap, and we’re down our…” his voice cracked suddenly and he looked away. “We’re down our best heroes. When I’m needed, I’m gonna be there this time.”
He tried to tell himself she just didn’t understand, that she hadn’t been there so there was no way that she could, but there was so much more to it than that. She could never understand, and the one person who could was gone because of him. Because of them.
Guilt was eating him up inside, guilt that he had been piling up reasons for for more than ten years now. Guilt and regret that had started to fester and mutate into something else.
Resentment.
“Clint, you couldn’t have done anything to stop it,” Laura tried to reassure him but he shook his head.
“You don’t know that.”
She looked at him sympathetically. “All the other Avengers were there, and they weren’t able to stop him. There’s nothing you could have done.”
Ah, so that was it, wasn’t it. If all the others with their godlike powers and and fancy tech couldn’t stop Thanos then what could the guy with a bow and arrow do? Was that what she really thought of him? What they all thought? “I could have tried,” Clint insisted. “I should have been there with them, not stuck on house arrest. The others didn’t let that stop them.”
“The others didn’t have a family to think of.”
She was trying to placate him, but there was an edge to her tone when she said that, a note of frustration and judgement that angered him. “So that makes it okay?” he shot back, “To abandon them to fight a world ending threat while I stay here and chop wood and have picnics?”
She clenched her jaw, trying to keep her emotions in check. She had tried to be understanding and give him space, but it was clear she was reaching the end of her rope. Taking a deep breath and swallowing down her anger, she stepped forward and placed her hand softly on his arm. “You didn’t know.”
“But I should have!” He exploded, brushing off her touch and getting to his feet, putting distance between them. “I should have been there!”
She dropped her hand back to her side, back rigid, expression a mixture of hurt, frustration, and anger. “It was five years ago, you can’t keep beating yourself up over it,” Laura tried to soothe him, but her tone was more annoyed than sympathetic now, and everything she said was the wrong thing. There was no right thing she could say.
“Yeah, five years for me, but not you.” He rounded on her and pointed at her as he said it, movements sharp, jagged, so different that the usual controlled reserve he exhibited. He tried again to tell himself that she didn’t know, that she couldn’t know. But she should. “You think this is all about not stopping the snap in the first place? That wasn’t even the beginning! “ He was breathing heavily now as he felt that heavy weight on his chest again, like a hand squeezing his heart, compressing his lungs, making it hard to focus, to function. “You know things haven’t been the same since Loki. Then SHIELD fell, and then this happened and… if I had been there I might have been able to prevent it from happening in the first place, but after that…” he shook his head, not ready to dredge up the more distant past so focusing on the more recent events, “you have no idea what I’ve been through.”
“Then tell me!” It was the first she had raised her voice in weeks, and it was the push he needed. They had both been walking on eggshells since this had all gone down, and it was time to get over it. It was time to lay it all out.
“You wanna know, Laura? You really wanna know?” he said, his voice a strange combination of condescension and pleading. He knew she wouldn’t handle it well, knew exactly how this would push her away, but he also needed her to hear it, needed to say it out loud. She needed to know what he had become. “Because if I tell you there’s no taking it back. Are you sure you’re ready for that?”
She hesitated, weighing the decision carefully. He could see she was curious, but also annoyed at his behaviour lately; she was feeling contrary, frustrated, concerned, angry, and beneath it all he could see something else: a hint of fear. She knew as well as he did this was the point of no return. She could just walk away, put it off like she always did, like she had in the past, but this time there was no more pretending, no more missions to give them space to forget. It was time to face the music.
She steeled herself and replied, “I want to know.”
He knew he should sugarcoat it, that for her no time had passed so she didn’t have to fit back into a post snap life. They were isolated here, nothing had changed like it had for the rest of the world… like it had for Clint. He shouldn’t be angry with her for not getting it and trying to push him to move past it, but he was tired. He was tired of pretending, tired of living this lie. He wasn’t the man he had been before, and he couldn’t just go back to that. He couldn’t just move on like nothing had happened.
“When I lost all of you I went off the deep end. I didn’t know what to do with myself, and I couldn’t accept that bad people in the world got to live while good people didn’t.” It was a gross simplification of what had really happened, but he did not want to get into that now. The reasons were much more deep-seeded and complicated than that, had been building for years even before the snap, but it didn’t matter. It didn’t change the outcome, and it was the outcome that mattered now.
“Clint, that’s understandable. I think every good person wonders that in their lifetime.” She was trying to be reassuring, not just to him but herself as well, but it grated on his nerves instead.
“Yeah, but good people don’t go on killing sprees because of it.” He stated it so bluntly that for a moment the silence closed in around them so thick it was almost suffocating.
He could see her working it out in her head, coming up with an acceptable excuse. He knew how her mind worked, could read her like a book. There had never been anything complicated there, she was completely open and transparent. She hadn’t had to learn how to disguise every thought and emotion for fear of death. “I have known what your job was from the beginning,” was her eventual reply. It wasn’t going to cut it.
“This wasn’t a job,” he said, shaking his head but keeping his eyes locked on her face. “This wasn’t taking people out from a distance, cleanly and efficiently. This was personal. I traded my bow for a blade so I had to get close, so I could see their eyes as I killed them. And I enjoyed it. It was satisfying watching the light fade from their eyes, washing away all the blood at the end of the day. I was judge, jury, and executioner and it was the only thing that made me feel alive.”
She unconsciously took a step back from him, and he could see it in her eyes, the moment she mentally recoiled as well, the moment she realized that this wasn’t the same man she had married. There had been signs over the years, ever since his exposure to Loki’s sceptre, but they had spent so much time apart and he had hid it well. For her this hadn’t been gradual. For her everything had changed over night. One moment he had been an attentive father and steady husband, the next he was distant, brooding, and could barely even look at any of them without practically projecting sadness and pain.
“I can’t take back what I did, and I can’t just pretend it never happened,” Clint continued. Hanging his head, he tried to drum up the courage to do what needed to be done; what was best for all of them. “While I was off playing vigilante… she was holding what she could of the team together. She was helping children that had lost their parents, protecting people and following the rules while she did it. I can’t-“ his voice cracked and he swallowed hard, trying to blink back his tears. “She was the best of us. She atoned for her past a thousand times over but would never quite believe it, but me… I dunno if I ever can and…”
Something had broken within him when Natasha had died, something deep and fundamental to everything he was. He had lost himself over the past decade, slowly at first, then more rapidly after the snap, but in that short time when he had her back he felt centred again, more like himself than he had in years. She reminded him of who he was, what he stood for, and then she was gone and nothing made sense anymore. How could the world keep turning when she was no longer part of it? How did the sun rise? The tides change? How could he just go on with his life now that half of him was missing? Because that’s what it felt like, as if his soul have been torn in two and he’d never be whole again.
“It shoulda been me.” The words were so soft they were barely audible. He hadn’t meant them for Laura’s ears, but they had just slipped out, a statement so true he couldn’t stop it.
She hesitated before she protested, the words feeble, uncertain. “Clint, don’t say that-“
“It should have been me!” He cut her off for both their sakes. What if she tried to tell him his family needed him, if she unknowingly threw Natasha’s words back at him? He couldn’t bear it. “But it wasn’t, and I gotta live with that, but I can’t do that here. I can’t just fit back into this life. I’m not that person anymore. I can’t… I just can’t.”
He closed his eyes to try to hold back his tears, and she made no move to comfort him. Would he have let her if she had tried?
“Clint, you’re tired. We can talk about this tomorrow.” Her voice sounded so distant, so hollow. It was just lip service, words she knew she was supposed to say, but they both knew there was no point to it. She knew everything now, everything he had done, everything he was feeling, and she finally understood. Not what he was going through, not what he was feeling, not him, but she understood why he could never go back. One night, one year, one lifetime wouldn’t matter. He had changed beyond recognition, and they had stayed the same.
It was over.
“Try to get some sleep,” was the last thing she said, her tone flat, emotionless. Whatever they’d once had had been broken long ago, but now they were finally on the same page.
She left him alone then, and he collapsed onto the old futon that had been his bed since he had returned. That had been hard, but tomorrow would be harder. Tomorrow they would tell the kids. Tomorrow he would pack his things and set them all free.
Tomorrow he would take a page out of Natasha’s book and start atoning for what he had done. He would find a way to honour her memory. She had died so he could live, and he would not waste what time he had left. Somehow he would do right by her.